The College Fix

We shouldn’t ignore such things for the sake of politics

It’s still possible, it can still happen: At the University of Denver last week, an assembly of conservative activists hosted a debate and…that was it. Nobody shouted the speakers down. There were no trash cans set on fire. A mob of infuriated students didn’t assault anybody. The whole thing didn’t cost half a million bucks in security fees. Nobody, so far as we know, had to retreat to a safe room full of Play-Doh and therapy dogs. It was just a quiet evening of young adults discussing an interesting topic with calmness and rationality.

It can be easy to forget that campuses are capable of handling such debates. But they are. And it is a poignant reminder of the mess in which colleges find themselves that we are surprised and delighted when they don’t lose their minds over a simple discussion.

This kind of thing throws into stark relief why we do what we do here. Media like The College Fix have been criticized for the kind of campus reporting we do. At Slate last week, the writer Ruth Graham sneered at our reporting on a “Christian privilege” workshop, while elsewhere we have been criticized for reporting on the outlandish and sometimes bigoted behavior of many college professors. There are more than a few people who would prefer that The Fix stop reporting on the things we report on, by-and-large campus goings-on which campus progressives would very much like to keep hidden from the world.

You can understand, at least from the liberal point of view, this desire. And yet it is ultimately a strange one. There are those who believe, for instance, that an explicit classroom policy of calling on white male students last is not worth reporting on. But why shouldn’t it be? Institutional racial discrimination at major American universities, particularly when such discrimination is so overt, surely qualifies as news. Then, too, does a debate tournament in which men are banned in order to grant women a “safe space” in which to debate, one in which “their bodies aren’t necessarily on display.” The implications of such a policy—that men are inherently dangerous and women inherently weak—is absolutely worth reporting on.

If either of these circumstances were reversed—if a professor announced a policy of calling on black women last, say, or if a tournament excluded women in order to put less pressure on men—the headlines would be round-the-clock and the firings would be legion. This is news, whether the Left likes it or not.

But then that seems to be the primary motivation for covering such things up: Politics. The absurdities of the modern American campus are, when exposed to the light of day, deeply embarrassing for progressives. If it were your political philosophy on display, you might want to ignore it, as well. Thankfully, The Fix, along with may other media outlets, is not going to ignore it; we’ll keep doing what we do, and the people who would prefer we not will just have to deal with it.

MORE: The power of the press is real, and it is vitally important

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